When Okwui Okpokwasili talks about her work, she treats each question like a knot to be unraveled, physically as much as verbally. Emphatic gestures punctuate her sentences, or complete them, as if movement might summon the answer.

“I want to fall apart, just enough,” she said recently over coffee near her Brooklyn home, discussing her approach to performing and making performance. Her palms opened like the pages of a book, suggesting a blank slate, or a readiness for anything. “And there’s this hope that something else can come through — I don’t know what.”

If you’ve seen Ms. Okpokwasili onstage — in her own genre-blurring work or in that by dance and theater artists like Ralph Lemon, Dean Moss and Young Jean Lee — you probably know what she means. Nearly six feet tall, with a hypnotic voice and limbs that swallow up space, she pushes herself to the edge as a performer, playing with extremes of ecstasy, sadness or rage with almost dangerous intensity.

Her Bessie Award-winning “Bronx Gothic,” a fiercely intimate solo inspired by her Bronx upbringing (and the subject of a new documentary coming to Film Forum in July), began with her trembling to the point of near exhaustion. In Mr. Lemon’s 2010 “How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?” she spent part of each performance in tears.

It’s a certain kind of getting lost. “I’m looking for mysteries, looking for some useful confusion,” she said.

While that goes for all of her work as a choreographer, writer, performer and director, Ms. Okpokwasili, 44, was referring to her latest, “Poor People’s TV Room,” which begins a two-week run at New York Live Arts on Wednesday, April 19.

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From left, Nehemoyia Young, Ms. Okpokwasili, Katrina Reid and Thuli Dumakude and rehearsing “Poor People’s TV Room” at New 42nd Street Studios.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

A collaboration with her husband and longtime creative partner, Peter Born, also 44, the project grew out of her interest in resistance movements propelled by women, black women in particular, and the body as a site of protest. Exploring themes of memory and invisibility, Ms. Okpokwasili, who is Nigerian-American, is joined by three women ranging in age from their late 20s to late 60s. (The oldest is the South African singer and Olivier Award-winning Broadway actress Thuli Dumakude.)

A meeting of dance, text, song, video and installation (Ms. Okpokwasili cringes at talk of disciplinary categories), “Poor People’s TV Room” is even more elusive, in terms of genre and story, than her previous works. Asked if there’s a narrative, she replied, “Kind of, -ish.”

Since its inception almost three years ago, as a 50-minute song that she performed in Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium, the piece has passed through multiple iterations (and grown closer to 90 minutes), including performances in January at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which commissioned the work with Live Arts and Lumberyard.

“I think she doesn’t want it to be too legible in a concrete, narrative sense,” said Philip Bither, the Walker’s senior performing arts curator. “It has a certain logic, but it’s very hallucinatory, very dreamlike and surreal, and I think that’s all intentional.”

While the results may be porous, Ms. Okpokwasili pinpoints two specific sources of inspiration. In 2014 she became fascinated by the Bring Back Our Girls movement, the international response to the kidnapping of nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram. She found it troubling that as the demand became a viral hashtag, touted by celebrities around the world, people lost sight of the movement’s originators, the mothers of the girls.

To Ms. Okpokwasili the phenomenon seemed to reflect “how the cultural contributions of black women, African women, have been erased,” she said in an email. “So I wanted to begin a kind of uncovering, for myself.” That brought her to an earlier instance of Nigerian women’s resistance, the Women’s War of 1929, in which thousands of Ibo women from southeastern Nigeria opposed the threat of taxes from British colonizers. Their struggle was known in the Ibo language as “egwu,” which means dance, and involved protest tactics rooted in the body, like older women baring their breasts in front of government officials.

While Ms. Okpokwasili’s initial inspirations may not be obvious in the final piece, they informed the questions that run through it and that she continues to ask. “What is it, my interest in brown bodies and brown women performing?” she said. “It’s about a staking of presence, of place, but how to do that in a way that doesn’t further entrench practices that diminish them?”

In thinking about those questions, she and Mr. Born have experimented with revealing and obscuring the body, aided by his set design, which includes large swaths of semitransparent plastic and a disorienting use of live-feed video. “Maybe you can’t see the things you want,” Ms. Okpokwasili said. “Here are these black bodies, and maybe there are ways in which you can’t have access to them.”

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Ms. Okpokwasili and Ms. Reid rehearsing “Poor People’s TV Room,” Ms. Okpokwasil’s genre-blurring piece about protest and its erasure.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

Working as collaboratively as they do has taken time and space. In a phone interview, Mr. Born said the two had enjoyed “the luxury” of several residencies where they could assemble the work’s many moving parts (a process that, under other circumstances, might be confined to a few rushed days). The most substantial was a two-year residency at Live Arts, one of the country’s most coveted opportunities for choreographers, offering a full salary, health insurance, production funds and other resources.

“I get to wake up in the morning and just think about the piece,” Mr. Born said. “I don’t have to go be a P.A., I don’t have to help load a truck. I did that for many years.”

At a rehearsal two weeks before the New York premiere, the work was still in flux, with the script being tweaked, lines relearned and differences hashed out.

Both Ms. Okpokwasili and Mr. Born, who is white and grew up in Madison, Wis., said that argument is a driving force in their process. Many of their debates have revolved around the role of “spoken tongue language,” as Ms. Okpokwasili calls it, versus the work’s physical language, which at times suggests a body breaking into pieces or striving to keep another body alive.

“There’s something so essential communicated by how these women are moving with each other that sometimes we’re like, is the language superfluous?” Mr. Born said of the script, which he and Ms. Okpokwasili wrote together. Ms. Okpokwasili added, “Our fights over what the text is, or who gets to place this language in these bodies, have become kind of complicated.”

For Ms. Okpokwasili, dancing, as much as speaking, is a form of questioning.

“There’s a raw, feral quality to her being,” said Mr. Lemon, who has worked with her for over a decade. When he first saw Ms. Okpokwasili dance, he said, “It was like looking at something I’d never seen before, certainly something I couldn’t generate from my own body, and with this full commitment and incredible confidence.

“Playfully, I’d describe her as a sister from another planet.”

Perhaps it’s that planet where “Poor People’s TV Room” resides. Katrina Reid, one of the performers, described entering the work’s strange world as “coming upon an unmarked grave.”

“It’s been interesting to inhabit this space,” she said, “where it’s not about picking up the first answer or the easiest answer. It’s about trying to find a truth, or multiple truths, or finding not even an answer but a more appealing question.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Falling Apart. But Only Just Enough.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe